The present invention relates to the novel antibiotic feglymycin, processes for its preparation and its use.
A large number of antibiotics have been employed therapeutically for the treatment of bacterial infectious diseases. The pathogens, however, are becoming increasingly resistant to the pharmaceuticals used, and there is even the threat of great danger due to so-called multiresistant bacteria, which have become resistant not only to individual groups of antibiotics, such as, for example, .beta.-lactam antibiotics or glycopeptides or macrolides, but simultaneously carry several resistances. There are even pathogens which have become resistant to all commercially available antibiotics, and infectious diseases which are caused by such bacteria can no longer be treated. There is therefore a great need for new agents which can be employed against resistant bacteria. Indeed, many thousands of antibiotics have been described in the literature, which, however, are mostly too toxic to be able to be employed as pharmaceuticals.
The development of resistance also presents a problem in the control of immunodeficiency, the so-called AIDS condition, which is caused by the new type of virus, the "human immunodeficiency virus" (HIV). There is still no medicament for curing an AIDS condition. The agents which have been employed until now can admittedly prolong the life expectancy of HIV-infected persons, but due to the formation of resistant viruses, medicine urgently needs novel, nontoxic virostatics.